The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) - IMDb IMDb 17 January 2017 8:05 PM, UTC NEWS There was an error trying to load your rating for this title. Some parts of this page won't work property. Please reload or try later. X Beta I'm Watching This! Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Error The Purple Rose of Cairo ( 1985 ) PG | In New Jersey in 1935, a movie character walks off the screen and into the real world. Director: From $2.99 (SD) on Amazon Video ON DISC a list of 28 titles created 10 Mar 2013 a list of 49 titles created 21 Sep 2013 a list of 48 titles created 30 Jun 2015 a list of 26 titles created 12 Dec 2015 a list of 42 titles created 5 months ago Title: The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) 7.7/10 Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below.

You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. Nominated for 1 Oscar. Another 14 wins & 14 nominations. See more awards » Videos In his attempts to reconcile a lounge singer with his mistress, a hapless talent agent is mistaken as her lover by a jealous gangster. Director: Woody Allen A nostalgic look at radio's golden age focusing on one ordinary family and the various performers in the medium. Director: Woody Allen "Documentary" about a man who can look and act like whoever he's around, and meets various famous people. Director: Woody Allen Between two Thanksgivings two years apart, Hannah's husband falls in love with her sister Lee, while her hypochondriac ex-husband rekindles his relationship with her sister Holly. Director: Woody Allen An ophthalmologist's mistress threatens to reveal their affair to his wife, while a married documentary filmmaker is infatuated by another woman. Director: Woody Allen In czarist Russia, a neurotic soldier and his distant cousin formulate a plot to assassinate Napoleon. Director: Woody Allen A wacky inventor and his wife invite two other couples for a weekend party at a romantic summer house in the 1900s countryside.

Director: Woody Allen A middle-aged couple suspects foul play when their neighbor's wife suddenly drops dead. Director: Woody Allen When their best friends announce that they're separating, a professor and his wife discover the faults in their own marriage. Director: Woody Allen A nerdish store owner is revived out of cryostasis into a future world to fight an oppressive government. Director: Woody Allen While attending a retrospective of his work, a filmmaker recalls his life and his loves: the inspirations for his films. Director: Woody Allen When a bumbling New Yorker is dumped by his activist girlfriend, he travels to a tiny Latin American nation and becomes involved in its latest rebellion. Director: Woody Allen Edit Storyline Cecilia is a waitress in New Jersey during the Depression and is searching for an escape from her dreary life. Tom Baxter is a dashing young archaeologist in the film "The Purple Rose of Cairo." After losing her job Cecilia goes to see the film in hopes of raising her spirits. Much to her surprise Tom Baxter walks off the screen and into her life. There's only one problem..Tom isn't real. Meanwhile Hollywood is up in arms when they dicover that other Tom Baxters are trying to leave the screen in other theatres.

Will Tom ever return and finish the film or will he decide to stay in the real world? Written by Ricky Darbonne <nsdar8115@alpha.nsula.edu> Taglines: She's finally met the man of her dreams. He's not real but you can't have everything. [Video] Genres: 19 April 1985 (USA) See more » Also Known As: La rosa púrpura del Cairo See more » Filming Locations: Did You Know? Trivia Jeff Daniels 's Gil Shepherd character has the same first name as Owen Wilson 's Gil character in Woody Allen 's later film Midnight in Paris (2011) made and released about twenty-six years later. See more » Goofs As Cecilia and Gil play and sing in the music store, the camera casts a shadow in the lower left that disappears as it pulls back to a wide angle shot. See more » Quotes See more » Crazy Credits Alexander Cohen 's name is listed as "Alexander H. Cohen" in the opening credits, although the middle initial is dropped in the end credits.

See more » Connections (California) – See all my reviews Woody's stories are often derivative, but he's forgiven that, usually, because the results are good and ultimately do deserve his signature. For PURPLE ROSE, he swipes Buster Keaton's gimmick in SHERLOCK, JR., then lets his imagination run free as he did in the best of his NEW YORKER stories. We wind up with the most fascinating and realistic meditation regarding what it is to be an audience, a viewer's relationship to art, art's relationship to reality. The triumph is amazing, because, despite the depth of the symbolism, PURPLE ROSE can also be seen as sheer entertainment; on its surface, it is still one of the most entertaining pictures Woody has ever made. Farrow and Aiello are marvelous here; Mia, who is quite underrated, has only been as good once -- in BROADWAY DANNY ROSE. The photography is superb, influenced perhaps by Edward Hopper with generally less obvious light sources. Splendid, splendid work. 42 of 47 people found this review helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes Audience Reviews for The Purple Rose of Cairo ½ Classic and classy Woody Allen.

Tom Baxter, an adventurous movie character steps off the screen to woo Cecilia, a starry-eyed, Depression-era waitress and cinephile, but the character's portrayer, Gil Shepherd, a smooth, somewhat megalomaniacal rising star, is called in to counter-woo Cecilia so that the show can go on. Woody's escapist fantasia is blissful yet tragic, blurring the lines between reality and make-believe, the haves and the have-nots, and love and truth. It was nice to see young, wispy Dianne Wiest and bug-eyed Glenne Headley as slinky prostitutes. After watching so much cantankerous old Jeff Daniels on "The Newsroom," bright-eyed bushy-tailed young Jeff Daniels is a remarkable palate cleanser, with a great singing voice to boot! Mia Farrow is, of course, charismatic and vibrant with her delicate voice and damselly beauty. The last scene of her, dejected by the wretched realities of her life yet still utterly captivated by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in "Top Hat," is just the most indelible final image in Woody's canon. Alice Shen Super Reviewer "I just met a wonderful new man.

He's fictional but you can't have everything." In 1930s New Jersey, a movie character walks off the screen and into the real world. REVIEW There's no way you can't like the ingenuity of the movie, and the fun it has. It's about the joy of life, and love of the movies, and the difficulty to tell the difference sometimes (at least when in the theater). In some ways this is one of Woody Allen's lightest movies, and certainly lightweight compared to the more serious movies of this period (like the stunning gem, "Another Woman"). It's not zany like his earliest comedies ("Love and Death"). And it's not deeply observant and sometimes downright moving and brilliant like his best movies (like "Annie Hall" or "Crimes and Misdemeanors"). In that way it feels like what some novelists would call an "entertainment" to distinguish from their heavier masterpieces, and sometimes these are the most readable of all. Or the most watchable. "The Purple Rose of Cairo" is inventive, warm, and touching.

It's really high brow hilarious when the people on the screen react to the situation, not only because of the existential reality shift going on, but because they are all high brow types. Then there are the everyday scenes with Mia Farrow, the lead actress in the real world (usually), and support from Danny Aiello, really just a foil for the main romances (two) going on with Farrow (singular). It's not as complicated as it sounds, which might prove the elegance of Allen's writing. A beautiful, delicate movie without undo weightiness. Joyous, yes, even in its melancholy end. Lorenzo von Matterhorn Super Reviewer One Allen film w/o himself or one of his numerous doppelgangers, which is a clue that here is a subject that is finally larger than Allen: his love of movies, that he freely shares with movie fans everywhere. So he takes one of the movie fan's most cherished desire (" ... I wish I could be there ... or that here was like there ...") and plays with it a little. Mia Farrow plays us, the fan, is our doppelganger, and the movies are a) better than real life, and b) but not real life.

One of the better Allen films, Farrow's contented gazing at the screen too brief to be iconic, but it should be ... Kevin M. Williams Super Reviewer Funny, charming and lighter than air, The Purple Rose of Cairo is the quintessential Woody Allen comedy. As per usual, the cast is a delight: a perfectly cast Mia Farrow, Jeff Daniels and Danny Aiello. The visuals and the music are enchanting; the ending, perfect. I actually preferred the similar Midnight in Paris but I thoroughly enjoyed Purple Rose as well. Fernando Rafael Quintero Castañeda Cannes film festival review: Midnight in Paris | Film | The Guardian Cannes film festival review: Midnight in Paris 3 / 5 stars Cannes opens with a Woody Allen love letter to the French capital, a shallow examination of nostalgia with endearing performances from Owen Wilson and Marion Cotillard Cannes openers ...

Carla Bruni-Sarkozy and Owen Wilson in Midnight in Paris, the first film shown at the Cannes film festival Wednesday 11 May 2011 08.45 EDT First published on Wednesday 11 May 2011 08.45 EDT Share on Messenger Close From this movie's opening postcard-view montage of Paris — familiar in a number of ways — it's clear the French capital is to be added to the list of cities that Woody Allen adores, and idolises all out of proportion . His new movie was an amiable amuse-bouche to begin the Cannes festival feast: sporadically entertaining, light, shallow, self-plagiarising. It's a romantic fantasy adventure to be compared with the vastly superior ideas of his comparative youth, such as the 1985 movie The Purple Rose Of Cairo, in which it was possible to step through the silver screen, or his 1977 short story The Kugelmass Episode, in which it was possible to enter the world of Madame Bovary.

And it's notable for a cameo from Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, playing a deadpan, tolerant museum guide: though it's a measure of how muted Woody Allen movies are now that she is not obviously outclassed by everyone else. The camera adds 10 pounds, they say, but this rule does not apply to the fashionably thin Carla Bruni. I wonder how Carla's sister Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi would have played the part. Once again, Allen finds himself in a luxury-tourist European destination, whose interiors he somehow manages to bathe in a soft golden-yellowy glow, like that which might suffuse the lobby of a five-star hotel. As so often, the film features a lead character who should really be played by the director as a younger man, though perhaps Allen intends his movie's main theme — the fallacy of nostalgia — to be targeted at those critics who worry that his films aren't any good any more. Owen Wilson is Gil, a wealthy Hollywood scriptwriting hack who still yearns to write a great literary novel; a visit to Paris with his testy fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her grouchy parents triggers a mid-career crisis.

Irritated by the banality of contemporary culture, and electrified by his own idealised view of bygone bohemian Paris, Gil takes a midnight stroll, and gets picked up by mysterious revellers in a vintage automobile. He finds himself whisked back in time, hanging out with F Scott Fitzgerald (a nice performance from Britain's Tom Hiddleston) not to mention Dalí, Hemingway, Picasso, Buñuel, TS Eliot and many, many more. These great figures from the past — Gil doesn't meet any non-legends in his time-travel — cause him to fluster and squeak with excitement, though Wilson, fundamentally laid-back as ever, doesn't give it the comedy-astonishment that Woody himself would undoubtedly have delivered. Gil's ingenuous enthusiasm entrances Picasso's beautiful mistress Adriana, played with conviction and finesse by Marion Cotillard: they fall in love, but it appears that Adriana is just as discontented with her time period as Gil is with his. It could be that Allen is satirising not just necrophiliac pining for the past but a kind of "history tourism" and "culture tourism" to go with the literal tourism described in the movie.

Or it could just be that Allen is hopelessly in thrall to precisely this glib tourist view of Europe. Well, he's brought back a negligible, pleasant piece of work from his city break. The view of Owen Wilson strolling, incidentally, shows a distinctive loping gait: like Robert Mitchum or John Wayne, he might have one of the most notable walks in Hollywood. Charlotte Higgins: Woody Allen opens the 64th Cannes film festival with his paean to the French capital, Midnight in Paris Published: 11 May 2011 Woody Allen's fortunes wax and wane, but he's always a favourite in France, where Midnight in Paris opened this year's Cannes film festival. Xan Brooks gauges the critical reception – and gives his verdict on Allen's latest spot of crowdsurfing Published: 12 May 2011 Andrew Pulver: With some awful London films under his belt, Allen has proved that he can't write British.

But, as Cannes opener Midnight in Paris demonstrates, he knows how to do the American abroad Published: 11 May 2011 Woody Allen, Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams presented Midnight in Paris, and Robert De Niro's competition jury took their first bow before the press Published: 11 May 2011 Film Review: 'Midnight in Paris' - CineVue - Movie Reviews and Articles Film Review: 'Midnight in Paris' Reviews ★★★★☆ Woody Allen's continued underlying flirtation with fantastical situations - previously witnessed with the screen-fleeing charm of The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) and hypnotism-induced antics of The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001) - returns once again within Midnight in Paris (2011), the seasoned auteur's forty-first directed feature in so many years, and stars Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Kathy Bates and 'First Lady' of France, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy.

Returning full time to the rose-tinted streets of Paris, after partially alighting there twice previously in Love and Death (1975) and Everyone Says I Love You (1996), Allen's touristy representation of the city of lights bears a similar resemblance to the narrative it is pinned to; a prosperous American couple tagging along on a family business trip the French capital and experiencing more than just rooftop wine tastings and tours of the Musée Rodin. Just as his ode to New York City in Manhattan (1979) threw us head-first into a giddy montage of stark black and white panoramic shots, cut to the grandiose patter of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, here Allen spoils us with an idyllic, if slightly bushed opening celebration of all things Parisian, brimming with joie de vivre as it shifts from the Tuileries Gardens to Monet's Giverny and, of course, the Eiffel Tower, easing us in to what can easily be described as a love letter to this picture perfect city.

Whereas London posed as a background shift to visually, but unsuccessfully, mask lacklustre material four times over; Scoop (2006) and Cassandra's Dream (2007) being two damp examples, Paris serves as refreshing, welcome inspiration, a gear shift for a director whose weathered career is jolted back to life, matching bouncy dialogue and a whimsically comical plot with the glossy climes of the sepia toned city of love. Paris, bathing in the warm glow of Darius Khondji's cinematography and Cole Porter tunes is here very much a character in the same vein Allen's beloved New York has been in a multitude of prior films, and it is accompanied by a wealth of talent who channel and bring to life their fictional, and in some cases non-fictional characters; in particular Adrien Brody’s larger than life Salvador Dalí and Corey Stoll's verbose Ernest Hemingway, constantly chugging from the wine bottle.

Yet, it is Owen Wilson, reminding us that for every Hall Pass (2011) and vacant canine caper he is still some semblance of a watchable actor, who excels as the giddy, wide-eyed Allen cipher Gil, and is perhaps the director's most convincing synonym since his prolonged on-screen absence, though he has written himself into next year's The Bop Decameron (2012). If jet-setting to European locales that reward his low-key, shifting auteurist stature with reputable box office returns is what it takes to get Allen back in the groove, then so be it. Despite it being somewhat of a subjective cliché to label his latest effort as a return to form, Midnight in Paris is definitely Woody Allen firing on all cylinders. Edward Frost Midnight in Paris – review | Film | The Guardian Midnight in Paris – review 3 / 5 stars Woody Allen is back on form – just about – with this light-as-a-feather fantasy about 20s bohemian Paris Dream a little dream ...

Midnight in Paris Thursday 6 October 2011 17.20 EDT First published on Thursday 6 October 2011 17.20 EDT Share on Messenger Close The souffle rises as it has not done for many years in Woody Allen's new film Midnight in Paris , which (incredibly) is already the most commercially successful of his career. It's a funny, slight comedy whose time-travel conceit is managed effortlessly; there's something of Allen's 1985 movie The Purple Rose of Cairo as well as his 1977 short story The Kugelmass Episode, about the guy who enters the world of Madame Bovary. Allen is famously a film-maker who has outlived his heyday, and whose continuing output seems uneasy and dated in the 21st century. So perhaps it's the fantasy-nostalgist theme of this movie, the retreat from the present day, that has restored his mojo. In the present, the film clunks a bit. But in the past, it zips along.

The modern setting is luxury-tourist Paris, five-star hotel Paris, the Paris routinely available to wealthy and middle-aged visitors, and the film begins with a montage tribute of picture-postcard images to Allen's trad-jazz score; it's weirdly like the one that began Manhattan, though without the voiceover and it's unmistakably the work of an outsider. (It's possible that Allen has seen the brisker, shrewder Paris streetscape montage that begins Mia Hansen-Løve's movie Father of My Children. Perhaps someone will now do a YouTube mashup of banlieue scenes from La Haine to Allen's clarinet.) Owen Wilson takes the proxy-Woody role as Gil, a disillusioned Hollywood screenwriter who comes on a tense trip to Paris with his gorgeous fiancee Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her parents. Idolising the bohemian Paris of the 1920s, Gil finds that the city has revived his dormant longing to be a serious novelist. One night, while strolling alone in the city, Gil sees a mysterious antique vehicle roll up and its champagne-swilling occupants urge him to jump in.

He travels back in time with them to a party where he encounters F Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Cole Porter – and falls in love with Picasso's mistress, played by Marion Cotillard . Wilson plays it exactly right: bemused, excited, throwaway, and Cotillard has delicacy and charm. There are real laughs, witty touches galore, beguiling cameos – and the film is actually about something. When the action returns to the present, the fizz declines, and I have to say the final, crucial confrontation between Gil and Inez doesn't work. But for simple pleasure, the sort of reliably stimulating pleasure Allen used to deliver all the time, that confectionery of sophisticated wit … Midnight in Paris does well. This may not be a return to the glory days, but it's a vivid reminder of them. That's almost as good.

David Edelstein on �Midnight in Paris’ -- New York Magazine Movie Review ShareThis (Photo: Roger Arpajou/Mediapro/Versátil Cinema/Gravier Productions/Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics) Given that Woody Allen’s imaginative universe has long been a closed ecosystem (no contemporary culture can penetrate a defensive shell hardened by such determined phobias), it’s a miracle he can still turn out a movie as disarming as Midnight in Paris. This supernatural comedy isn’t just Allen’s best film in more than a decade; it’s the only one that manages to rise above its tidy parable structure and be easy, graceful, and glancingly funny, as if buoyed by its befuddled hero’s enchantment. That hero, Gil, is played by Owen Wilson, and he’s finer than any male actor who has ever stood in for Allenï¿½finer than Allen often has been, too. Gil is a successful Hollywood screenwriter who considers himself a hack and wants to write novels, preferably in Paris, where he’s on holiday with his go-go fiancée, Inez (Rachel ï¿½McAdams).

And if he had his druthers, he’d be doing it in Paris in the twenties, alongside Scott and Zelda, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Cole Porter, Picasso, Cocteau, and all those other giants living large yet somehow creating enduring works of art. Yammering about Paris in what Gil considers its golden age while Inez scoffs, Wilson is wide-eyed without being fatuous, and lines that could sound like lazily reflexive, Yiddish-inflected gripes become philosophical and urgent. His stammer is never shtick. It wasn’t until Wilson’s apparent suicide attempt that some of us finally identified the vein of wistfulness under the stoner cool, the longing for definition behind the spaciness. As Gil, this straw-haired Texan makes Allen’s rhythmsï¿½along with Allen’s essential disappointment at living in the here and nowï¿½his own. The mechanism by which Gil travels back (via vintage automobile at midnight) to his beloved era goes happily unexplained, thus eliminating the sci-fi wheels and pulleys that tend to suck up so much screen time in time-travel movies.

Allen just breezes past all that, the way he did in his great The Purple Rose of Cairo and, before that, in his 1977 short story ï¿½The Kugelmass Episode.ï¿½ Actually, the twenties scenes recall another Allen story, ï¿½A Twenties Memory,ï¿½ which is full of passages as blissful as this: ï¿½Hemingway had just finished two short stories about prize fighting, and while Gertrude Stein and I both thought they were decent, we agreed they still needed much work ï¿½ We laughed a lot and had fun and then we put on some boxing gloves and he broke my nose.ï¿½ Allen doesn’t do much with Scott (Tom Hiddleston) and Zelda (Alison Pill)ï¿½perhaps he’s too in awe of them. (They do loom large.) But his Hemingway, played with forthright manly-manliness by Corey Stoll, is riotously funny, and as Gertrude Stein, Kathy Bates proves that one earnest straight person can be more treasurable than a thousand clowns.

Allen holds his trump card until the halfway mark, when a celestial vision appears, as if sprung from the sub-sub-basement of a turgid Christopher Nolan picture: Marion Cotillard as Adriana, mistress to the star-artists of the twenties, and so unfathomably gorgeous that she doesn’t seem to be of this or any era. Cotillard is a true showstopper: She creates her own cinematic present. Allen has become such a fluid craftsman that the occasional off notes don’t matter too much. Having to work so fast (and cheap) has freed him from what might have been a hell of Kubrickian fussiness. Write it, shoot it, edit it, move on to the next one, and don’t stop, because if you do, you may not ever be able to start again. Like many of Woody Allen’s films, Midnight in Paris ends with a moral, this time vaguely self-deprecating, with an anti-nostalgia kick: Everyone wishes that he or she lived in another era, even people in that other era. It hurts because we know from Allen’s frames of reference that he’s often lost in pipe dreams of the past.

But it’s possible there’s another kind of nostalgia at work in Midnight in Paris: not just longing for the Parisian twenties but for the days in which Allen regularly turned out freewheeling, pitch-perfect parodies like this. The movie is so good it’s takes you back to those days, which were the days, my friend. Woody Allen Reveals How He Conjured Up His Biggest Hit 'Midnight in Paris' | Hollywood Reporter Woody Allen Reveals How He Conjured Up His Biggest Hit 'Midnight in Paris' 2:52 PM PST 1/7/2012 by Gregg Kilday Roger Arpajou © 2011 Mediapro, Versatil Cinema & Gravier Productions/Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics "Midnight in Paris" Out of a lifelong love affair with Paris, the director opens up to THR on the motivation behind the award contending film, why he was smitten with Owen Wilson's West Coast vibe and his blissful defiance of his sister's concerns.

If the making of Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris were itself a Woody Allen movie, it would start something like this: After a tastefully understated title card -- simple white lettering on black -- and against a jazz arrangement of, say, Cole Porter's "I Love Paris," the camera slowly zooms in on a window at the Hotel Ritz Paris, where Allen is looking out over the Place Vendome. In voiceover, we hear his thoughts: "I have a tendency to romanticize Paris," the writer-director confesses. "When the lights come up and it's almost midnight, everything looks so pretty." Somewhere here, he knows, there has to be a movie. Cut to: Back in New York, Letty Aronson, Allen's younger sister and his primary producer since 2001, has just finished reading his latest screenplay, the fanciful tale of a modern-day Hollywood screenwriter who finds himself, suddenly, magically, wandering through the Paris of the 1920s, brushing shoulders with Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. "Who is going to come to see this film?" she asks her brother.

"I don't think a lot of people even know Gertrude Stein and certainly not Man Ray. I just feel it's for a real niche audience." PHOTOS: The Making of Woody Allen's 'Midnight in Paris' Cut to a sunny day in Los Angeles: Owen Wilson is closing the script that Allen has sent over for him to read. In an accompanying letter, the director explains the movie he is planning is going to be very romantic, and he wants Wilson for the lead. Wilson is puzzled, though. He isn't quite sure how all the time-travel stuff works and wonders who Allen is going to find to play iconic figures like Fitzgerald and Hemingway. "It all just seems sort of far-fetched," he says to himself, yet he's intrigued. Cut to: Marion Cotillard at her apartment in Paris as she takes a call from Allen, whom she's never met. He has a part for her in his new movie, he explains, that of a woman in the Parisian demimonde who's romanced by both Hemingway and Picasso.

They talk for more than an hour, and when the call ends, she turns to some friends who are visiting and exclaims, "Oh, my God, I've been talking to Woody Allen -- that was Woody Allen's voice!" PHOTOS: Costumes of 'Midnight in Paris' Cut to: Several weeks later. Allen is now back in the City of Lights. Production on the film is due to start in a few days, but first he and his cinematographer Darius Khondji, accompanied by a couple of camera assistants, are wandering the streets, capturing shots of the city that will be used in the opening montage. Allen is delighted by the overcast sky and the wet pavement -- it's just the look he wants. But then a fresh wave of rain pours down. Both men are drenched, but Khondji realizes, "Woody didn't care at all that we were wet. He was just completely happy because it was the right feeling for the film." Serendipitously, so.

Allen has perfected an almost clockwork approach to filmmaking -- since 1969, when he directed his first feature, Take the Money and Run, he's completed 41 more films at a remarkably consistent rate of almost one a year. But his latest film has broken out of the pack. Having brought in $56.3 million domestically and $145.2 million worldwide, it's his top-grossing movie ever. (The 1977 Oscar-winning Annie Hall collected $38.3 million domestically, the equivalent of about $143 million today.) Midnight -- an enchanting fantasy in which Wilson finds himself transported back to the movable feast that was Paris in the '20s, only to learn that nostalgia for the past isn't all it's cracked up to be -- has given Allen new currency. PHOTOS: Cannes Film Festival 2011 Allen fell in love with a title, Midnight in Paris. But for the longest time, he couldn't decide what exactly would happen at midnight, until he stumbled upon the idea that a car could pull up and whisk him into the past.

"To me, the torture is getting the idea, working the idea out -- its general plot, structure and story," Allen says of his process. "But once I know that, I can write a screenplay in two, three weeks. It's the difference between writing it and writing it down. It becomes pleasurable for me and flows easily because I've done all the spade work beforehand." Even though, in this particular story, his protagonist would be encountering some of the artistic giants of the 20th century, Allen didn't need to research the period. "I didn't have to. I did read them when I was younger," he says. "Characters like Hemingway, Picasso, Salvador Dali. They are so vivid and have such pronounced styles, I didn't have to do any research at all. I could write it off the top of my head." VIDEO: THR's Award Season Producers Roundtable As for his sister's doubts that there was an audience ready to make their acquaintance, Allen wasn't concerned. "I knew that I knew Gertrude Stein, and I'm not the most literate person," he says. "The movie would be for those people who do know her. I never think about the audience.

If Letty had been correct and only a minuscule amount of people would have been interested in Paris in the '20s, that would have been fine with me too." But first there was another problem. Since the movie was, in part, a period piece, Aronson couldn't see how it could be filmed under the modest budgets with which Allen comfortably works. And so the script was set aside for several years, until France introduced a tax rebate for international productions in 2009. That allowed Aronson to bring the budget down to $18 million, and with funding from Spain's MediaPro, which had struck a deal to finance three of Allen's pictures, beginning with 2010's You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, the movie was ready to move forward as the filmmaker's summer 2010 project. PHOTOS: Sony Pictures Classics' 20-Year Timeline As it took shape, Allen's longtime casting director Juliet Taylor suggested offering the Texas-born Wilson the lead role. Although he would be a departure from the director's usual choice of onscreen alter ego -- typically an actor playing an East Coast neurotic -- Allen liked the idea and even reworked the character of Gil for a better fit.

"Owen's persona, his sound, is so much more rooted out West or in California. He looks like he'd be at home surfing. So I had to change it," Allen says. "But I think that was a help to me because I made him a successful California character, a guy with a house and swimming pool. It sharpened the poignancy of wanting, in the face of all that commercial success, to really do something that was comparable to what those bohemians in Paris had accomplished." Wilson himself was somewhat bemused by Allen's fascination with his West Coast lifestyle. "He talks about me always being at the beach. I think he thinks I live at SeaWorld," Wilson cracks. For Gil's difficult and demanding fiancee, Inez, Allen says he had Rachel McAdams in mind as he was writing. And when he pitched her the part, he told her, "It would be much more interesting for you to play this kind of character. You don't want to go your whole life playing these beautiful girls. You want to play some bitchy parts.

It's much more interesting for you." When it came time to cast Adriana, the muse who bewitches Hemingway, Picasso and Gil, he says, "I did need a French actress, and Marion came to mind very quickly. With great good luck, she was willing to do it." While at the theater in New York, where he'd gone to see his friend and sometimes leading lady Scarlett Johansson in A View From the Bridge, Allen discovered Corey Stoll, who was also appearing in that play, and invited him to read for Hemingway. The actor, who has since gone on to be nominated for a Spirit Award for his performance, relates, "He handed me a couple of pages of Hemingway dialogue. It burned through my fingers, I was so excited to see Hemingway on the page. I had no idea what it was for, but he gave me some direction and that was easy." By now, the project was moving forward in the efficient, businesslike way that characterizes Allen's productions. Even though half the movie takes place in the past and includes added forays into the Belle Epoque and Versailles, production designer Anne Seibel knew she was operating under tight limits.

"The challenge was to find locations and transform them," she says. Since the famous Moulin Rouge has been extensively modernized, she found an old ballroom that could be retrofitted with a minimum of effort. And for Stein's salon, she copied the original, down to the famous paintings on the walls, but notes, "It was more creating the mood of the period than reproducing the exact chair." Meanwhile, Khondji had discussions with Allen about shooting the 1920s sequences in black-and-white, but they eventually decided to go with color, giving the past a warmer, richer glow than the contemporary scenes. "Normally, Woody likes images that are very, very red, on the warm side," he says. "And I like gold very much. So I colored it during the shooting, I gelled the lights and used old lenses for the period pieces." Allen, who doesn't indulge in long rehearsal periods, called his actors together for the first time just a few days before filming began.

(Wilson, who'd just recorded some of his voice work for Pixar's Cars 2, arrived in Paris with restaurant recommendations from the Pixar staff who had worked on Ratatouille.) They all brought along a certain set of expectations about what it would be like to work on a Woody Allen movie. "I thought he would be different, but he was actually very talkative on the set," Cotillard says. By contrast, Wilson found that "maybe I was a little shy myself. And he's a reserved person, so for the first couple of weeks we didn't talk a great deal, but as I got more comfortable, we started to kid around more." He was particularly amused watching Allen play with his iPhone. "His daughter told me all he knows how to do is check the weather," the actor relates. "And he'd been saying stuff like, 'It's 100 degrees in Cairo today.' " When it came time to work, Allen didn't stand on ceremony.

Moving briskly along -- the shoot took just 35 days over seven weeks -- he'd frequently tell the actors to use their own words, to "make it more natural." And, says Stoll, "for the big group scenes, he'd figure out the traffic patterns, but then he'd want it to be messy. That was his most common direction: 'Make it messier, make it more like life.' " Through it all, Wilson was just about the only actor on the set who knew everything about how the two halves of the movie -- the period scenes that were shot first, followed by the contemporary section -- fit together. Allen and Wilson may have made for unlikely collaborators, but, says Cotillard, "Woody Allen in a way found in Owen his kind of spiritual son. It was like it was meant to be. Owen fits so perfectly in Woody's universe, it was really organic and made total sense." And any doubts that audiences wouldn't get the movie's conceits began to melt away as soon as Midnight was unveiled as the opening-night film of the Cannes Film Festival in May. By then, Sony Pictures Classics already had acquired North American rights and quickly moved to open the film to take advantage of the momentum.

It's been playing in theaters, entertaining audiences, ever since. Cut to the present: "It's always nice," Allen, who resolutely maintains his distance from all the awards hoopla that now surrounds the film, says of its rapturous reception. "I make them for the fun of making them. I work at a comparatively low budget and make the films for my own enjoyment and hope that other people like them, and so it's always nice when they do. And in this case, people have embraced the movie. I must say, I'm now well beyond it. I've finished another movie already, and I'm preparing a movie for next summer. So for me, Midnight in Paris was something I did a few years ago. But nothing pleases me more than knowing people have gotten pleasure out of it. That's always a nice bonus." ♦♦♦♦♦ ECHOES OF EARLIER ALLEN FILMS: Having directed 43 movies, the prolific filmmaker can be forgiven if he sometimes repeats himself. Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) The tempestuous relationship between artists and their muses -- Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz are a recent example -- is a subject to which Allen has repeatedly returned.

Everyone Says I Love You (1996) Allen and Goldie Hawn dance together along the banks of the Seine in this casual musical -- the first time the director shot part of one of his features in Paris. The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) Blending fantasy and comedy has resulted in some of Allen's most heartfelt work. Here, Jeff Daniels plays a matinee idol who steps out of the screen and into the arms of Mia Farrow. Annie Hall (1977) Allen loves targeting insufferable know-it-alls, like the guy he and Diane Keaton encounter in a movie line. Michael Sheen's character gets the same treatment in Midnight. What's New Pussycat? (1965) On his first visit to Paris, Allen wrote and c0-starred in this sex comedy. Unhappy with directors Clive Donner and Richard Talmadge, he vowed to direct his future scripts.

Question: Who directed the 1985 film 'The Purple Rose of Cairo' and the 2011 film 'Midnight in Paris'?
Answer: WOODY ALLEN